Television Review: The Bear and the Maiden Fair (Game of Thrones, S3X07, 2013)

The Bear and the Maiden Fair (S03E07)

Airdate: 12 Many 2013

Written by: George R. R. Martin
Directed by: Michelle MacLaren

Running Time: 57 minutes

The world of A Song of Ice and Fire is, by design, a brutal and uncompromisingly patriarchal one. George R. R. Martin’s literary endeavour has often been to interrogate this world not by forcing the reader to view it through the eyes of those it marginalises: the women, the bastards, and the broken things. This compensatory approach—using female perspective to critique a male-dominated milieu—finds a complex and sometimes flawed expression in The Bear and the Maiden Fair, the seventh episode of Game of Thrones’ third season. On one level, the episode can be read as a mosaic of female agency, from Daenerys’s imperial resolve to Brienne’s brutalised endurance. Yet, as directed by Michelle MacLaren in her series debut, it also exposes the show’s own conflicted instincts, where character study vies with a gratuitous hunger for sensationalism, ultimately rendering the hour a tense, uneven prelude to the carnage to come.

MacLaren’s involvement is historically significant. As the only female director to helm an episode of Game of Thrones, her hiring marked a rare concession by the production to a perspective other than the male gaze that so frequently dominated the series. A veteran producer and director from Breaking Bad, MacLaren brought a seasoned hand to proceedings, and would go on to direct three more episodes across seasons three and four. Her work here is competent, if not yet showcasing the visceral flair she would later employ. She manages the episode’s sprawling geography with clarity, but one senses the constraints of the material; much of The Bear and the Maiden Fair is an exercise in marking time, moving pieces across the board with deliberate, sometimes glacial, pacing. It is another season three instalment where little of epochal consequence occurs, its primary function being character exposition and the meticulous setting of stages for the seismic events of the season’s final act.

The most unequivocal assertion of female power comes, as ever, from Daenerys Targaryen in Essos. As the Unsullied army approaches the slaver city of Yunkai, Jorah Mormont cautions that its walls are strong, capable of withstanding a siege that would bleed Daenerys’s nascent forces dry. The political calculus shifts, however, when the number 200,000—the slaves within—is invoked. Daenerys’s resolve crystallises not merely as strategic ambition, but as a moral imperative. In a sharply written exchange with the city’s oily emissary, Razdal mo Eraz (George Georgiou), she dismisses chests of gold and jewels. Her ultimatum is simple, revolutionary, and utterly feminine in its empathy: free every slave, or face dragonfire. This is agency writ large, a queen defining her cause not by territory seized but by chains broken.

Elsewhere, agency is more circumscribed, negotiated, or violently stripped away. Near the Wall, Ygritte and Jon Snow’s romance is tempered by political reality. Their tender discussion of belonging is poisoned by the knowledge of Jon’s impending betrayal and Orell’s jealous warnings. Jon’s pragmatic argument—that the wildlings’ invasion is doomed, as all past attempts have failed—underscores the tragic inertia of their world; individual desire is crushed by historical cycles. A similar protective fatalism grips Osha in the North. Increasingly hostile to the mystical Reeds, especially after learning Jojen’s visions may lead Bran beyond the Wall, she shares a haunting story of a lover lost to the White Walkers. It is a moment of raw, feminine wisdom born of trauma, a warning against the allure of destiny that the show rarely affords its older women.

In stark contrast, the episode’s most notorious sequence presents agency as a grotesque parody. Theon Greyjoy’s continued torment at the hands of the mysterious Ramsay Bolton reaches a new nadir of sadistic theatre. Two women, Myranda (Charlotte Hope) and Violet (Stephanie Blacker), are sent to his cell. They disrobe, arouse the broken prisoner, and Myranda proceeds to have brief, joyless intercourse with him. MacLaren drains the scene of any eroticism, replacing it with dread. Hope’s performance is key; her depraved smile aligns her utterly with her unseen master’s cruelty. The audience’s foreknowledge that something terrible is coming transforms what might be a fantasy into a horror. The interruption by his tormentor, sarcastic comment on rumours of Theon’s large penis, and the subsequent order for his emasculation, completes the violation. This is where the episode’s, and indeed the show’s, ethical compass grows suspect. The scene is profoundly exploitative, a marriage of sexual display and extreme violence that feels less like a critique of torture and more like a lurid indulgence. It is made more problematic by the fact it is a pure invention of the television writers, a “spicy” addition not found in Martin’s texts. In this moment, Game of Thrones uncomfortably resembles the exploitation cinema it sometimes aspires to transcend, echoing the transgressive, but arguably vacuous, shock of works like Pasolini’s Salò.

The episode’s other deployment of sexuality could not be more different. Robb Stark and Talisa share a post-coital scene suffused with warm, romantic colour. They discuss her pregnancy and their future with a tender optimism that feels genuinely earned, a chemistry between Richard Madden and Oona Chaplin that had been lacking in prior episodes. Here, nudity and intimacy serve character and hope. This dichotomy highlights the show’s schizophrenic approach to HBO’s infamous mandate for sexposition: one scene uses physical intimacy to build connection, the other to amplify degradation, with the latter leaving a far more pungent aftertaste.

King’s Landing offers its own theatre of constrained agency. Margaery Tyrell performs a masterclass in political empathy, comforting Sansa over her forced marriage to Tyrion, all while advancing her own family’s designs. Tyrion, in turn, tries to reassure a fearful Shae, their private romance buckling under public duty. The episode also quietly underscores the real seat of power in a wonderful scene between Joffrey and Tywin. Joffrey’s petulant surprise at not being briefed on Daenerys is met with Tywin’s glacial dismissal.

The narrative finally coheres in its titular sequence, a masterful set-piece of tension and character redemption. Having turned back for her, Jaime Lannister arrives at Harrenhal to find Brienne of Tarth thrown into a bear pit, a wooden sword her only defence, while Locke’s men bawdily sing “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”. MacLaren’s direction shines here, balancing the grotesque spectacle with raw panic. Jaime’s leap into the pit is an act of instinctive chivalry, a culmination of his burgeoning moral awakening. With Steelshanks’s crossbow providing distraction, they escape, bound now not by chains but by mutual, hard-won respect. It is the episode’s most potent image of agency—seized a choice to protect another in the face of monstrous entertainment.

Fragmented moments elsewhere serve as connective tissue. Arya’s disillusionment with the Brotherhood Without Banners leads to her capture by the Hound, setting a new, darker course. A brief but effective scene with Melisandre and Gendry, sailing past the wreckage of the Battle of the Blackwater, ties past trauma to future sacrifice. Ultimately, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” is an episode of profound contrasts. It gestures towards female power while wallowing in the sexualised violation of a male body. It builds romantic hope in one corner and snuffs it out with surgical cruelty in another. Michelle MacLaren steers this unwieldy vessel with professionalism, but the script’s conflicting impulses—between Martin’s empathetic character focus and the show’s appetite for exploitative shock—remain unresolved. The result is a compelling, if often uncomfortable, piece of television that holds a dark mirror to its own world, and occasionally, to its own creation.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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